EvilDoers & DoGooders 2: The Concrete & Abstract

Much thanks for the response Peeperkorn. I’m afraid I’m only getting a glimpse of what you’re conveying about values, though; I’d need the specific example. My academic knowledge on the moral dualism subject is limited–I’ve read about it sporadically and thought about it more than a bit.

Now, I’m going to jump in over my head and see how badly I drown. It seems that related to the moral dualism discussion is the following supposition (which may be obvious or may be fallacy): it is only abstractions which seem to fall into dualistic categories, whereas concrete objects and time-space specific events don’t–i.e., there’s no opposite of a tree or a baseball game. While attributes of concrete things and events can be categorized according to a relative duality (left-right, hot-cold, light-dark), there’s no absolute to this except in the (abstract) of the Kelvin scale extremes. That said, I’m not sure of the exact relevance of this to my argument that the concept of ultimate Good and Evil is dangerous, stupid, and ubiquitous in our culture. I’m not saying that abstract concepts don’t have concrete application or that they are inferior to real world descriptors. I guess I’m just saying that forcing dualistically absolute abstractions onto human morality (actions)–or even worse onto human beings (objects)–just won’t work. There’s a gulf between the abstract conceptualizing of idealized polar extremes and biology, or even geology. I’d planned on touching on this in my critique of fundamentalism, although focusing more in that blog on the symbolic nature of words and language and how fundamentalists don’t get the basics. Hopefully, I’ll get to that sometime.